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Is it my imagination, or are crane disaster more frequent now than they were years ago?
If you raise the numbers of cranes operating in any given time period the laws of averages also change.
Right now NYC is in the midst of a historic construction boom, much of it high rise buildings requiring tall cranes. With all these projects going on at once and or within the same period the chances of something going wrong increase.
The other thing is you have all sorts of sloppy and cost cutting work going on as developers push to get their buildings up on time and under budget. Lots of non-union, poorly trained and or supervised workers are being hired atm. That explains the record number of construction accidents you are seeing like that poor guy who fell from a building and was impaled on a metal fence a week or so ago.
Unless or until NYC begins to crack down and stop much of the "self policing" by developers you are going to see more such incidents am afraid.
As we have been discussing in another thread developers who are making billons on these new buildings are by and large avoiding paying or even hiring union. Just as Mr. Walker found out when he messed with construction unions it isn't just about money.
Many persons (including Scott Walker) are ignorant of just how much training, education and so forth unions provide to their members. This is particularly true regarding safety. A steward or other person in charge can and will shut down a worksite if things are unsafe... well that just pisses off developers or whomever because all they see is that delays equal money.
Every other week for the past several years it seems you have media reports of this or that construction site accident in NYC. From workers being swallowed up into pits, walls collapsing, cranes falling, etc... Nine out of ten times it comes to light the site was mostly if not all non-union, using illegals, poorly supervised, self certified, doing illegal work or some combination of one or all. You have contractors/developers doing work on Saturday, Sundays, major holidays, after legal hours, etc... Again the City is either turning a blind eye or signs off on the out of hours work request.
When it comes to "big" construction and operating certain machinery such as those huge cranes there are only a finite number of men in the USA certified, trained and so forth, and they are booked solid.
There have been several major crane accidents over the past few years at NYC construction sites. Am afraid as per with NYC nothing will change until something *REALLY* serious happens; that is a crane literally takes down one or two other buildings and or causes massive loss of life. That along with the sure to follow legal actions (with large awards) is probably the only thing the City responds.
That's not how I see it, I'm guessing it's an engineering error. They put an extension on it yesterday morning and I'm guessing someone missed a decimal point on the counter-weighting
Yep,
Too much of a cantilever. Enough even to turn the cab of the crane upside down. This is man-made error.
Luck would have it that, I think, the new PATH train station has removed the thousands of people who would stream down Worth Street to get to the temporary (what, 10 years) PATH entrance on Worth near West Street. The street was always mobbed with people connecting to the Church Street subway station or points East.
Unless or until NYC begins to crack down and stop much of the "self policing" by developers you are going to see more such incidents am afraid.
As we have been discussing in another thread developers who are making billons on these new buildings are by and large avoiding paying or even hiring union. Just as Mr. Walker found out when he messed with construction unions it isn't just about money.
Many persons (including Scott Walker) are ignorant of just how much training, education and so forth unions provide to their members. This is particularly true regarding safety. A steward or other person in charge can and will shut down a worksite if things are unsafe... well that just pisses off developers or whomever because all they see is that delays equal money.
Every other week for the past several years it seems you have media reports of this or that construction site accident in NYC. From workers being swallowed up into pits, walls collapsing, cranes falling, etc... Nine out of ten times it comes to light the site was mostly if not all non-union, using illegals, poorly supervised, self certified, doing illegal work or some combination of one or all. You have contractors/developers doing work on Saturday, Sundays, major holidays, after legal hours, etc... Again the City is either turning a blind eye or signs off on the out of hours work request.
When it comes to "big" construction and operating certain machinery such as those huge cranes there are only a finite number of men in the USA certified, trained and so forth, and they are booked solid.
There have been several major crane accidents over the past few years at NYC construction sites. Am afraid as per with NYC nothing will change until something *REALLY* serious happens; that is a crane literally takes down one or two other buildings and or causes massive loss of life. That along with the sure to follow legal actions (with large awards) is probably the only thing the City responds.
Too much of a cantilever. Enough even to turn the cab of the crane upside down. This is man-made error.
Any boom length long enough to be remotely effective in an urban area will be more than enough to flip a crane. It happens all the time.
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